While this number can
grow to more than 4096 bytes for a directory that contains a lot of files, this number doesn??™t reflect
the size of files contained in that directory.
The format of the time and date column can vary. Instead of displaying May 12, the display
can be 2008-05-12 depending upon the distribution.
Checking System Activity
In addition to being a multiuser operating system, Linux is a multitasking system. Multitasking
means that many programs can be running at the same time. An instance of a running program is
referred to as a process. Linux provides tools for listing running processes, monitoring system usage,
and stopping (or killing) processes when necessary.
The most common utility for checking running processes is the ps command. Use it to see which
programs are running, the resources they are using, and who is running them. Here??™s an example of
the ps command:
$ ps au
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 2146 0.0 0.8 1908 1100 ttyp0 S 14:50 0:00 login --jake
jake 2147 0.0 0.7 1836 1020 ttyp0 S 14:50 0:00 -bash
jake 2310 0.0 0.7 2592 912 ttyp0 R 18:22 0:00 ps au
In this example, the -a option asks to show processes of all users who are associated with your
current terminal, and the -u option asks that usernames be shown, as well as other information
such as the time the process started and memory and CPU usage.
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